There are some things you just don’t mess with, and the upcoming E3 video game conference is one of them. This year’s conference will be “toned down,” totally killing everything that once made the conference cool.
Digital Journal — Every year, the E3 (the Electronic Entertainment) Expo hosts a trade show for the computer and video games industry, where journalists, gaming gurus and celebs pack into a large venue to celebrate everything to do with gaming.
In short, the event, running from July 11 to 13, is enormously popular, last year adored by the 60,000 people who attended, and fodder for website and newspaper editorial for months after.
But this year, the organizers are changing the formula. The popular “booth babes” are gone (sorry Diggers), the multi-million dollar exhibits have been nixed, and the flashing lights and thumping music muted. The celebs have also been dropped, so bye-bye to Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton.
The organizers have taken a few of the main ingredients that make E3 the gaming event of the year, and changed it to be as exciting as Bingo day at a retirement home.
The event this year has been renamed the E3 Media & Business Summit (sounds exciting, doesn’t it?) and organizers want a less flashy discussion on the gaming world. Starting Wednesday, the invite-only event will come complete with “luxury beach-side hotels, sushi restaurants and meetings in private conference rooms,” according to a recent article in Forbes.
The high-brow affair sounds like it will be more reminiscent of a stuffy G8 Summit meeting than a video game conference. “It’s about the quality of connection for leaders of the industry,” said Michael Gallagher, once a policy adviser to the Bush administration and now head of the Entertainment Software Association, in an interview. ESA is the group that puts on E3.
Until changes this year, the E3 expo hosted many celebrities like American Idol judges Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson to help spread the word and get publicity. – File Photo
The Los Angeles event last year attracted more than 60,000 people. With so much media present and many big announcements from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, the Web was churning out gaming articles at button-mashing speeds. It was flashy and exciting, as a video game conference should be.
But this year’s organizers seem to disagree, saying the event has grown out of control and the needs of media, retailers and publishers were not being looked after well enough.
This year’s E3 conference has cut attendance back to about 3,000 people. The hundreds of developers that attended previous shows have been scaled down to 30 well-connected companies; bloggers and gaming fans have, for the most part, been kicked to the curb; and everything that makes gaming what it is today is being given a face lift.
Indeed, some publishers think the changes are for the better, saying the intimacy of the new event will greatly benefit those attending, putting the focus back on content and less on packaging.
This sounds good in theory, but so does communism. I’m not convinced the previous years’ shows had any problem addressing content. In fact, I think it’s all PR spin. E3 has grown to be the No.1 gaming conference for a reason, and that is the games and consoles. Booth babes, celebs and $8 cheeseburgers might not interest everyone who attends, but they have made E3 into a Mecca for gamers.
Today, the average gamer is about 33-years-old, and has played video games for the past 12 years. They are the driving force behind the multi-billion dollar industry.
I think it’s clear there is an another motive for toning down this year’s conference, and that is avoiding bad press.
Recently, violence in video games has come under attack, and some American politicians continue to preach video games to be just as sadistic as Judas Priest albums of yesteryear.
Conference organizers have decided to kill the idea of having “booth babes” at this year’s E3 Expo. – Photo courtesy Wikipedia
Gallagher is a politician (he was chief of staff for Washington State Republican Rick White, and worked in various positions in the Bush administration) who has played in the big leagues, and he’s showing it. As the gaming industry’s chief lobbyist in Washington, it’s his job to keep the gaming world producing and consuming video games without the sticky government fingers messing up the controllers.
Gallagher says he is also a gamer himself.
Working with a rough $20 million budget, Gallagher and the ESA are trying to educate the government about video games and leave a sweet aftertaste. In an interview with the New York Times, Gallagher said:
I think there is a bit of a generation gap, federally, given that a number of the legislators — especially since Congress operates on the seniority system — are older. Video games came very late in their content-consuming careers, and so they’re not as familiar with the intense innovation, competition and excitement that come from video games.
Clearly, it’s in his best interest to make legislators see games as a business rather than a culture that worships first-person shooters, or women in mini-skirts.
But his past words also completely contradict his current actions, telling the NY Times in the same interview: Washington is very enamored with glitz and the appeal of stars. Whenever Bono shows up he creates this bow wave as he comes through, and it’s true that stars do help drive messages. And it is true that Master Chief and Mario are not yet household words on the Hill, but wait for the years ahead.
Gallagher seems to understand the power of celebrity, but doesn’t want it at his own events.
Gallagher is taking a risk, and it could seriously hurt the E3 Expo in the long-run. He might win his support in Washington (which would have pros for the gaming industry), but it will come at the cost of fans and public knowledge of the industry. If nobody can get in to see the only event everyone wants to see, the public will stop caring.
Gallagher’s moves remind me of the music industry’s tight grip on illegal downloading, where they were given a chance to work with the public but instead chose to exclude and fight it. We all know how popular they have become.
The same can be said for the future of the gaming world, where organizations like the ESA can embrace the public that wants to be part of the growth of the industry, or exclude it to appease Washington and their pocket books.
There is a tiny bit of good news for the rest of us, however. The ESA will hold a general conference for consumers this fall. Running Oct.18-21 in Los Angeles, the “E for All 2007” conference will be open to the public. There you can have your voices heard, while the industry rubs shoulders on its own.
